So I just started my first blue collar job a couple of weeks ago. I live in a rural, coastal purple state that has been trending blue for years. I’ve spent more than a few hours chatting with “the guys,” and as a terminal hexbear user I feel like I’m extremely sensitive to their political views. If you want to call them liberals, conservatives, right or left authoritarians or libertarians, it just makes no sense at all to me. They seem to hate corporations—except for the “good” ones that provide their treats. (They’re also fond of the large business we work for, or just terrified of even consciously complaining about it.) Some police are bad but others are just trying to do their job. One told me that we “really needed” a new police station that just opened up in town, while he has also stated that racism is bad. One Gen Xer told me that he has “made some money” through cryptocurrency, but he also has a dim view of the USA’s future (and climate change) and has said that he’ll be happy to just sit back and watch as the country burns down. It’s wrong that there are so many unoccupied houses here, but for you to become a landlord, that’s a totally legitimate thing to do. Some have asked about my masking, others totally ignore it. No one has been aggressive about it—yet.
What makes more sense to me is just having a spectrum ranging from “collectivist” to “individualist.” Libertarians and fascists go on the far right; liberals and conservatives on the right; social democrats / democratic socialists on the center-right, and communists and anarchists on the left. It just seems like this makes my coworkers’ political views much easier to understand. They’re individualists. They don’t like when rich people or the police get in their way. But they’re happy to be rich (at everyone else’s expense) and to have the same police protect them.
As an aside, I’ve been doing white collar work since I graduated from college and I only just moved into the blue collar field a few months ago. (If you google my name, you’ll see that I’m a communist, which means that it’s impossible for me to do white collar work at this point.) I’m writing a book about the whole experience. I would also make videos about it but I need to remain anonymous because there’s so much money in this field and I’d like to start a worker co-op as soon as I feel comfortable working with this shit. (There’s tons of blue collar work to do, but living here is very expensive and the state is running out of workers because it’s more profitable for landlords to have AirBnBs.) I’m interested in training communists, constructing at-cost housing, and doing a political takeover here. We would only need a few hundred people to have enough voters to take over the town, defund the police, and drive out the landlords. These plans are pretty vague though and would take years to pull off, so please feel free to critique them.
My spouse found out about a month-or-so-long class for fixing oil burners. Fuck oil but I decided to go for it. The class was also free (thanks to covid relief money, not sure from which president). It was definitely not easy. They used a lot of words I had never heard before. But I survived! And graduated. I took my state’s license test a few weeks later and passed. At that point, I started calling local businesses. All of them were super excited when they talked with me, but none of them followed up and some even canceled interviews they had scheduled (presumably because they googled me and learned about my sordid political past). Maybe the fifth business I contacted, which is probably the biggest in my state, brought me in for an interview the morning after I called them (in the evening). I’ve been working with them for two weeks and so far it’s been alright. They said they’d start me off with $18/hr, but my first paycheck amounted to $13/hr, so I’m like, what the fuck is going on with that, I have to ask them in a couple of days. They said that once I’m comfortable enough to be working on my own, they’ll pay me $24/hr. The thing is, they charge customers $200/hr for service, so starting your own business is extremely tempting. A worker co-op could be life-changing for a lot of people, too. We could train communists in the trades and also radicalize blue collar workers (although the former is a million times easier than the latter). There are thousands of burners for every technician within like a hundred miles, and the best techs can only fix about four per day, so there’s no end of work to do and a lot of the customers are loaded. The only issues I can foresee are climate change destroying everything or oil burners getting replaced with heat pumps (which I welcome honestly).
What I would say at this point is that a lot of businesses of all kinds are desperate for help and would probably train you if you ask. You can call them, talk with them in person, see if the vibes are positive, and there are so many businesses it’s probably not an issue to quit and move on if it doesn’t work out. My experience thus far has been that blue collar work seems intimidating at first, but it just takes guided practice to understand. I don’t know that the class I took was necessary. It was also, like, eleven hours a day when commuting is included, and even more than that when you factor in all the homework and studying I did, so yeah. Doing hands-on work with people probably makes it a lot easier than listening to three or four hours of lectures per day, which is what I did.
Guns. It’s also not impossible that within five or ten years, the state will actually be too weak to bother with us. Who knows? Building up local power (backed with force) might be the only way we can even survive. I don’t know. The plan is just: learn blue collar work. Start worker co-op. Train communists. Build (or purchase) housing. Expand into other moneymaking fields. Run candidates in elections. Defund the police. (Other towns around here don’t bother with having police, though sometimes they pay the sheriff to patrol there.) There’s also so many empty houses here (in excellent condition) that even if every single full-time resident remained here, we could still bring in thousands of squatters without having to build a single house. Squatting laws in this state basically make it impossible to legally seize someone’s home—unless you have plenty of people with guns.